Nirvana Karkat x Reader (ch.7)

Nirvana Karkat x Reader (ch. 7)

You are cold.

Something has you bolted to the ground, and your chilled arms lay weak and heavy in your cold but welcoming lap.  

You attempt to open your eyes, but you see nothing.  How is it your mind has become so hazy?  You have become so weak, so tired... your head hurts... maybe... perhaps it wouldn't hurt if you just went back to sleep for a little longer...

Curiously, a muddled feeling urges you to stay awake.  'But why?'  You think groggily.  'Go away, please, I am so incredibly tired...' you just need to sleep a bit longer... your mind is foggy; no thought will come clear to you without great effort or resolve, neither of which you currently possess.

You make an attempt to sit up, only to be weighed down again.  Ah, you must be dreaming.  Perhaps you had already gone back to sleep without realizing, and that is why you cannot control your limbs or your eyes?  Yes, that makes sense.  You may simply continue to drift...

A shallow breath tickles across the skin of your chest. You make a second attempt to lift your heavy eyelids and observe the dream world around you, but are again met with darkness.  You must be in one of those dreams where the lights are out and no matter what you do, you stay in darkness.  You detest dreams like these; a virtuous ending would always manage to elude your unsuspecting imagination.  Another puff of air dances across your chest, and you lift a heavy arm to inspect what could cause such a peculiar sensation to your skin.  But when your fingers graze a pair of soft lips in the darkness, you are unprepared to react accordingly.  Your fingertips skim the rest of this foreign face in slow bewilderment; it is then you begin to realize that you are not bolted down at all, but weighed by this sleeping figure in your lap.  You continue to trace the sculpt of his face as you are at last confronted with a slow onslaught of memories from a former hour.  You trace his brow line, so relaxed in sleep, his nose, strange to you without a hint of scowl lines beneath it, then his cheekbones, and down to his lips again.  You imagine what his face would look like if you were to see it right now in the light.  Smooth, careless, relieved of all the burdens he habitually carries upon consciousness.  You wonder, silently, if Karkat would be momentarily thankful upon waking for the darkness which robs you of such a sight.  You, for one, are not quite as appreciative of your blindness.

A hand snakes up to hold your fingers to those lips, and you notice how softer, unsteadier, and how more self-aware the puffs of breath are now released.  He holds your fingers in place for several moments before whispering, suspiciously hushed,  "are you awake?"

Your heart almost aches when you feel his lips brush against your fingertips.  Cautiously, you answer him in a similarly hushed tone.

"Yes, I'm awake."

His breath steadies once again.  You brush his hair out of his face with your free hand and glance down at his face.  You cannot see, but know he can feel your gaze, as he begins to dig his face deeper into your collar.  You exhale a small puff of breath through your nose and smile.

"You can't hide in my neck forever, you know."  You push his hair back again.

He grunts and lowers your hand into his lap. "Fuck off."  Sighing, you lay your head back to rest on the wall.

Of course, you don't mind if Karkat stays nestled in the crook of your neck, or warms your skin with those gentle jets of warm breath, or shifts ever so slightly so to make himself more comfortable on your lap, all while tenderly clasping your hand to his chest.  No, you don't mind at all.  In fact, why did you feel it was terribly important to move from here in the first place?  After all, wouldn't you both be safer staying here for a little longer rather than wandering about in those halls again?  Now that you think about it, you rather like the feeling of embracing someone in sleep, wrapping your arms around each other and cradling as if the other is a fragile piece of your own still beating heart.  You want to hold him longer, you realize.  You want him to stay nuzzled into your neck just like this, you want to continue feeling like you mean something more to him than someone he only has to teach; you want this feeling of being something special to him to stay.

You open your eyes, surprised at not noticing they had been closed.  It wouldn't make a difference anyway; in such darkness that privilege is extinguished.

You realize that staying where you are for any longer would only invite a Stockholm dysania.  Disdainfully, you nudge your companion from your breast.

"Karkat, stand up.  We've got to get going."

He grunts but otherwise rises from your lap with no further objections, and your heart aches just a bit.

"Where are we going to go?"  He demands, voice groggy from sleep.  "Do you expect to walk out of this room to nothing?"  You blink.  You hadn't thought of it, actually.  With Karkat on your lap, you weren't thinking of much else.  "I doubt just because we took a fucking nap that thing- whatever it was- I doubt it would just go away, {f/n}."

He helps you stand as you take a few moments to analyze your situation.  Perhaps you are still in danger, but how long can you stay locked up in this room to keep from it?  Still, if it is dangerous you certainly don't want to drag Karkat along with you.  If that thing is still out there- and you have little doubt it is- the last thing you want is for it to get it's grip on your companion again, and you are sure he would not testify to that line of thought.  Still, the fact remains that you are left without a plan, stranded in an enclosed space without any contact with the rest of the passengers.  You don't even know if they are still alive.  And Karkat is right; you have no plan of action.

"I don't know,"  You admit.  

He sighs after a moment, resigned to the room.  He doesn't seem too bothered by your lack of positive contribution in this situation.  Why though, you don't know.  You are devastated at yourself; in a situation like this you should be on the front lines, throwing plans from every which way.  No, instead it seems you have made more of a negative contribution than a positive one.  You can't help but acknowledge your decline in leadership skills since your arrival on the meteor.  In the past, you would have formulated a solid course of action to take on your enemy and survive this nightmare- with a good solid chance of success at that.  But rather than do anything productive, you haven't accomplished a damn thing.

You only wish you had a way to contact the others on the meteor.  Unfortunately, after the shut-down all of your communication devices have become obsolete.

"Alright.  I'll scout the area quickly,"  you decide.  "If I report back with no sightings of danger, we continue to the next room in the hallway.  The rooms will be our base and safehaven should we see anything suspicious or threatening.  If we get to the next door without any sightings, we repeat.  Does that sound alright?"

Karkat grunts in approval.  You have a feeling he would agree to just about any plan you had as long as there is a plan.  

You admit, this idea of running around from door to door, blind of the danger until it's directly upon you definitely isn't the best of the strategies you've had in the past, but it's the only one you've got at the moment.  

Shrugging off the thought, you turn to the door and crack it open.  You peek into the sliver of space, reaching for the spare flashlight Karkat had brought.  Of course, when you turn it on it doesn't work.  Well, you should have figured really, if the rest of the technology doesn't work, why would you think a flashlight would?  Of course it wouldn't.  Obviously.

Exhaling in frustration, you toss the flashlight aside and slip through the door, deprived of visual aide.  You close the door behind you.  Now, how are you going to go about this?

You ponder your next actions as you lean on the door, shivering just a bit.  You realize you don't have many options, and the lack of light makes you nervous for whichever one you would inevitably take.  

You grow anxious as the seconds pass and your feet remain bolted to the ground in front of the door.  Your body grows colder in the absence of another source of heat, and you wonder if it had always been this cold on this part of the meteor.  You take the moment to be thankful Karkat is not with you.  You don't know how you would react if he were to find out your bold leadership stunt was a facade to mask this overwhelming fear.  Now that you are alone, you feel more vulnerable than ever.  

The images of the grotesque enation that had coiled itself around Karkat's leg invade your mind and chill your flesh.  Your heart pumps faster and blood rushes to your ears as your wide eyes begin to sweep the lightless corridor to your left.  The thought of what lies waiting for you in that darkness serves as fuel to stoke your paranoia.  In an effort to calm yourself, you shift your attention to the noises on the other side of the door (or lack thereof).  It seems Karkat hasn't moved since you left.  If you have to guess, you'd say he is probably standing still on the other side of the door and awaiting your return.  

And that means that you have got to get going.

You slide off the door with a gentle pull to your reluctant arms.  You are unused to such darkness still, but without your acuity your other senses are heightened to frightening extremity.  With overly sensitive fingertips, you graze the wall to your left and stride forward with blind grace and deliberation.  Though in your chest lies a thundering fear of being spotted, you press further on, for the thought of not returning to protect the waiting boy in the boxroom torments you far more than the fear of the vile tendrils skulking in the tenebrif of your mind.  


---

Karkat paces in the back of the cupboard room.  This is taking way too long.

"Fuck."  

{F/n} had left so long ago.  What could be keeping them?  Something must have happened.

Karkat stops pacing and looks up from his floor-ogling stupor.  No, that's not possible.  {f/n} is too careful.  They wouldn't have allowed themselves a failure on such a simple task.  Unless that same goliath tendril that had aggressed him earlier had come out of hiding... he has no doubt {f/n}wouldn't survive an attack like that on their own.

Karkat nervously wipes his mouth with the full of his hand and continues to pace.  No, that isn't what happened.  Of course it isn't.  

He curses himself for believing such a thing for any more than the second it might have been worth.

Although... it has been quite a long time...

"Fuck, {f/n}, what are you doing out there?"  It had felt like hours since {f/n} had left.  Perhaps, though, it had only been a number of minutes.  He wouldn't be able to tell if he were questioned.  Sometimes minutes would fade like a passing shadow; gone within an instant, but others it would seem he had spent eons in wait in this stagnant, dismal room for {f/n} to return to him.  Time seems to have no meaning when he is thinking of {f/n}.  On one hand, he could be preoccupied by thoughts of [him/her] for hours, but on the other, as long as he rides that train of thought he cannot bear to wait any longer to be in their presence without becoming frustrated, wistful and, though he wouldn't ever speak it, to himself of otherwise, lonely.

He would never understand why it is.  However, as an avid appreciator of suppressed romanticism in it's self-titled lore, he isn't foreign to the idea of the meaning behind these introspections- or the significance of their catalyst.  He only wishes for the strength to suppress them, an act he is digressing in more and more each passing day he confronts {f/n}, just as each day the diagnosis becomes more and more transparent to him.  

He only wishes he were as oblivious to it as {f/n} is.

Tempting though it may be for him to lull deeper into subconsciousness at the behest of these thoughts, the situation at hand slowly coerces it's way back into his immediate consciousness, convening, to his frustration, with designs allogeneous to his wishes.  Paranoia is a burden he had become accustomed to over the course of his perilous and oppressive existence on Alternia (even more so during his ventures in the medium), however, the immediate awareness of this particular deluge of reality he has found himself in, in which his trance attempts to eschew from, is being avoided for a reason, and he has become petulant at the rearing of it's ugly head once again.  It seems Karkat can not lie peacefully in thought for more than a few moments without his foul thinkpan reminding him, once again, of how awful reality torrents around him.

Still, though he hates the paranoia that keeps him on his toes every moment of every night, he must admit to the salience of this particular tug of reality deriving from it.  If it were anyone but {f/n} in this situation with him, he would simply trust their fortitude and not look back.  However, since he occupies the unfortunate reality in which this obviously is not the case due to his shit-dropping bad luck, he can't seem to do so.  He worries and worries and worries and still, the minutes pass and {f/n} does not return.  

It's true the reality of what he has to do has crossed his mind once or twice amidst his pacing, but his reluctance to do so only results in him pushing these thoughts down further and further, hoping {f/n} will return safe and sound and prove he has been fretting over nothing at all, until finally, he is aware that he can't push any further and must face reality.
He knows little of {f/n}'s true intentions or the details of his current predicament, but he is certain of one thing: {f/n} has been gone longer than necessary, and he now has to go find them.  

He is frustrated.  Frustrated at himself for not acting upon his fear sooner, frustrated at {f/n} for not returning to him, frustrated at that creature for stalking him and his friends (and possibly hurting {f/n}), frustrated at the lack of light, at his loneliness, at the technology's inadequacy, at the cold, the small rooms, the pain in his chest... everything.  

Karkat takes a small step to the door, still suffering the inner turmoil inside his mind but not so far gone as to forget his concern for {f/n}.  He closes the door behind him quietly as he steps out, careful not to draw attention to himself.

Immediately after exiting, he thrusts his hands to his arms.  Damn, he didn't realize it would be this cold outside.  Did {f/n} heed this sheer ague when they parted, or is it perhaps his imminent fear that gives him this chill?  He is paralyzed for a moment after pondering this, but recovers- eventually- due to little but luck.  He shuffles and moves about the couloir, attempting to get a feel of the once-familiar terrain before he ventures any farther.  He will berate himself too much to dwell on any physical negativities such as coldness that plague him now or in the erelong future.

Wandering the corridor at a leisurely pace, Karkat glances down each hall he passes with squinted eyes and scrunched up arms, shivering every so often along the way, careful to stay a safe distance from each window as he approaches it.  He checks each door and meekly calls {f/n}'s name, turning away and straying about a different direction when he receives no response.  

Perhaps it is his desolation that has brought it on, or perchance his anxiety acting up again, but it doesn't take long for Karkat to be burdened with an impending fear that he may be lost.

Of course, it's not like he hasn't been lost before, right?  He had lost track of his whereabouts several times when they had first sought solace on the meteor, and he always made it back just fine.

Although... it was also a lot lighter all those times as well.

'Well what do you do when you're hopelessly lost on a dumb rock you've explored hundreds of times just because it's a little dark?'  Karkat asks himself, his own inner voice laced with a snark that has himself wincing.  'You keep walking and pretend you know what you're doing, nookstain.  Then you lower a brilliant incandescent beam of sweltering fuck you down the protein chute of anyone with the audacity to say otherwise.'

Though perhaps the act is a bit easier said than done, which Karkat soon comes to realize as he stumbles through the halls, tripping over wires and paraphernalia gracelessly scattered about the floor and stubs his hips into the doorbells of- alas, even more empty rooms.


---


You aren't sure where your path has taken you, but you are plenty aware of the time ticking on and on inside of that thinksphere of yours.  You know you should turn back, should have turned back minutes ago, but where is back, even?  You know you are lost, and turning around would likely land you even farther from where you had planned to go in the first place.  No, perhaps your best bet is to keep moving forward and hope someone finds you.  It is, after all, your own fault for losing your sense of direction like that.  You had been so consumed with the thought of monsters, it seems you had completely forgotten that you were wandering though a ridiculously large meteor you'd never really had the chance to explore in the past to know your way around- and you are alone, to top it off.  

'Ah, that's right.  I am alone.'  You turn to look back, more for sentimental purposes than to see what's behind you.  You know what is behind you.  You had left Karkat by himself back there, scared half out of his mind and possibly more aware of the looming threat than you are.  You can only hope he stays in the room until someone finds him, or, if he were stupid enough to leave, that he runs into one of your- arguably- benevolent friends.  At least he would have company, if not protection.

Still, it hurts when you think about turning back.  You know you won't; it would only mess you up and you'd never find him, but at least it would do your conscious good to try.

You think about what he would say if you tell him you never went back to look for him.  Would he be crushed?  Angry?  You consider the fact that you'd never truly seen Karkat sad, so you wager he'd lean more toward the latter.  You yourself think not turning around is a nasty, selfish thing to do,  but what choice do you have?  You could tell him you were scared.  He would understand that.  He'd still be angry, but he would understand.

Even so... when you had told him your plan, there was a part of you that got to thinking.  Perhaps you had been so willing to execute such an embarrassingly weak plan because part of you knew that once you had initiated it, you wouldn't follow through.  There had been a small thought in that back of your mind, another plan, one that resided in a questionable, adrenaline-fueled part of your mind.  You are terrified, yes, but there is something so thrilling about what is happening.  You feel the same as you did when you had first installed sburb.  It was crazy, and what you were doing had been so dangerous and you knew it, you knew the risks, but somewhere in the back of your mind you had reveled in the excitement it had given you.

There is nothing smart about what you are thinking,  and you know it well, but you know just as well that no one else would dare to do it.  You know it's selfish, oh it is so selfish, but a small part of you is succumbing to that thought of well if we're going to die anyway...

You know if you don't try, you would forever be haunted by the thought of

maybe

Just maybe

And

WHAT IF

You turn back to face northward.  Your heart is racing and you are so scared, oh, god, you are so scared, but you find yourself moving forward with a new brand of vigor, with shaking excitement because

Oh god I'm really doing this

you know so well how much danger you're in,  how much more danger you're putting yourself in, how selfish you're being, and oh my how good it feels.  

Your nerves almost cause you to skip steps as you sprint down the halls.  You know when you are close, you can feel it; sense it.  And you know it feels you too.  Somehow, you get the feeling- a little, fuzzy feeling muddling it's way up from underneath your nerves- that perhaps it had been waiting for you, too.  Perhaps you couldn't find it before because it wouldn't let you- not until it knew for certain you were going to come.

But as you approach the unfamiliar, monolithic window, you realize, absently almost, that you were always going to seek it out from the beginning.  Every timeline has led to you coming to this spot in this moment, succumbing yourself to the inevitable.

You could never run from the horror.  You can not expect to hide from something that is already here.

And looking upon the horrorterror before you, it's vast exultation of power alone nearly bringing you to your knees, you know, oh god how well now do you know, just how real the leviathan is.  


Back when you had retreated into the cupboard room, it had taken Karkat long to fall asleep.  But you had waited.  You had begun to think.  You knew there were rumors of the monsters in this realm, dark gods, and you had known better than to think nothing of it.  You took a peculiar fascination in these stories.  These Gods that patrolled Dersian skies, these malevolent titans who cry at night with such yearning, waiting for someone to hear them, to listen, there must have been so much more to them than what had been spoken in myth.  

But you hadn't known at the time that they could exist in the pocket dimensions your meteor is traversing through.  That is, not until you saw one for yourself not hours ago.  You had gazed upon it's swollen topaz sclera from a distance of mere inches.


You crane yourself to the presence pulsing before you.  You cannot think, no, the dread in your soul is much too benighting.  Your mind is lethargic and your body torpid; you are wholly and utterly paralyzed with no hope of escape.

You don't think, but rather feel that yes, perhaps this had been the solution all along!  That Perhaps this has been the answer to all of my problems from the beginning!

This presence.

This darkness.

This power.

It is insidious, and it is calling you; tempting you, lulling you into it's grasp, but you don't understand... you don't understand anything anymore.

Ah, but that's fine.  You don't need to  understand, because you can feel it.  Their whispers invade your mind, coercing their way into your center, enveloping you until you have no choice but to give heed to them.  

This language isn't one you recognize.  It is cutting and incisive, a dour cacophony that seems almost counterfeit, made up; serpentine...

And yet you comprehend it.  You understand what it asks of you;  you understand when it asks for you, when it wants you to commiserate; to sympathize; to feel what it feels.

And as rapid as an oncoming deluge, your mind is overcome with this lexicon; you talk in this speech, you think in this speech, you scream in this speech.

You feel when it begins to overtake you.  Your body is weak, as if you had been wakerife for thousands of years, deprived of sleep and cold, oh so cold.

Your mind and body are not fueled by physical prowess but by power

Oh, this power...

and god, do you need sleep...

s'colja

sleep

sleep...

s'colja

You know your eyes are closed, but you don't want to open them

can't open them...

until you're certain it's all over.  Your ears ring in such vociferous clangor and you can't tell

is it quiet or is it loud is there noise or is it just me was that a scream oh god someone is screaming please don't be afraid

And suddenly... white.

A moment passes and your breath is labored.

You open your eyes.  You open your eyes, and you're on fire.